Hard to believe, but articles are popping up at business websites claiming that venerable Hewlett-Packard may fail. In their most recent fiasco, HP wrote off a loss of $8.8 of their $11.1 US billion acquisition of Autonomy and have alleged fraud in the deal. Revenue is down 7% from a year ago and the stock has hit a 10-year low. The company is laying off 27K employees but that may not be enough. Some speculate HP might be broken up into parts with buy-outs involved. This article from last May offers a good in-depth analysis of how all these problems came to pass.

As I said before, it's very easy to see with such clarity when you're an outside observer, but there's potentially all kinds of details we're not privy to that would create major complications.

I understand that. I never said it was easy. But what concerns me is that a number of people automatically side with the decision of letting people go just like that *clicks fingers*, without being privy to any details either.

The fact that the "ordinary person" can say - oh, the company is in trouble, I agree, let's lay people off - suggests that the actual people running the company aren't really paying attention to details of their operations either.

There are still some companies out there that would rather retain employees then let them go because brain drain hurts them more than the plain numbers suggests. We never hear them in the news.